


Fork No Lightning

by AmazingGraceless



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Department of Mysteries, Gen, inspired by Interstellar, time-travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28051842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmazingGraceless/pseuds/AmazingGraceless
Summary: The Department of Magical Law Enforcement makes a discovery in one Aleister Corey's estate of an experimental Time-Turner without the limitations of the stock available to current witches and wizards. They pass it along to a team of Unspeakables to investigate, but the team is lost until the time-turner shows up again in the hands of a young witch.





	Fork No Lightning

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the QFL's Daily Prophet and the "Adventure Continues" prompt. The movie used was Interstellar, where a rough approximation of the plot with time-travel, a young female protagonist, and the theme of love prevailing over space and time are all from the film. Well, and the title is from the motif of Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle, which was important in the film.

Morag MacDougal knew she had to be careful. The Department of Mysteries never was guarded or locked at night, but that wasn't out of carelessness. It was purposeful—anyone who ventured in who did not belong there would have the fight of their lives to return from any meaningful explorations of the place.

As soon as she passed the threshold of the singular locked door, the walls blurred as the door rotated. Morag would figure out the exit later. There would be time for it, eventually. She had waited for this for too long to be stopped now. It was a guess, which door she needed to enter— but she had no need to guess. All she had to do was wait.

After a moment, two symbols were smeared into the dust in the floor—two ancient runes that Morag recognized from her time at Hogwarts. One that said 'here' and another that labeled the room as 'time.'

Another confirmation of her suspicions—she had wondered what exactly her sister had worked on.

Her older sister, Isobel, had worked in the Department of Mysteries four years ago. As an Unspeakable, she never told anyone exactly what she was up to, but they knew the general job description and the reputation. Their parents had been so proud. Isobel was to work with the greatest secrets their kind would ever know, secrets that most mortals were perfectly comfortable to live without knowledge of.

Like her sister, Morag wasn't most mortals.

She opened the door and wasn't surprised to realize that she had in fact gotten it right. Row upon row of shelves greeted her, full of Time-Turners falling and crashing and reforming again in an endless cycle—a permanent consequence of Harry Potter's adventures. Beyond these shelves were other desks and smaller cabinets that showed various experiments, all to do with time.

Morag paid these experiments no mind and walked straight past them to the door in the back with the little brass plaque nailed to the front labeling it as belonging to the manager.

" _Alohamora_ ," Morag whispered. She was unsure why she was doing so, as clearly no one was there to catch her. But this was the eerie sort of place that demanded quiet, and Morag was loath to get herself in trouble with the greater powers that lurked within the Department of Mysteries.

The door swung open.

" _Lumos_." Morag held her wand aloft as she entered the manager's office. The manager of the Time Room kept their room full of clutter. The desk and built-in bookshelf were filled with trinkets, the bookshelf having the additional burden of perhaps a few too many books. The nearby cabinet hosted what could practically be classified as a miniature jungle on top of it. Once again, Morag knew to wait for a sign for her ghost. Well, not hers specifically, or one that compared to any laws Morag knew of what ghosts were supposed to be. But it was clearly some invisible entity that left signs through interactions with the physical world. No one else seemed to perceive it except for Morag.

A photograph of the director, his spouse and his child fell onto the ground. Glass splintered everywhere, the frame snapped.

" _Reparo_." Morag then picked up the repaired photo. The current director was the husband of the old one, a Regina Rowle. Isobel had described her as a bit of a gossip and as having a maternal presence—especially after the loss of the couple's daughter to a malediction.

 _Poor man,_ Morag couldn't help but think. His wife and daughter were both gone now, with only the laughing photographs left to comfort him. She couldn't understand how he had come to take her place. Surely grief would have driven him mad, would have made it too difficult to exist and work in this space?

She put the photograph down and investigated the bookshelf. That meant the files had to be held here. She pulled off a red book with no title or any details whatsoever on the cover. Inside was a table of contents, all listing the various files.

Morag closed her eyes, remembering the day when everything changed for good.

* * *

It had been a rainy summer morning, the kind that she liked best, when she could brew a cup of tea and enjoy a good book in the bay window of her room, and the world seemed to be her own little secret.

But that morning, when Morag had tiptoed downstairs to brew her cup of tea, she saw Isobel putting on her favorite scarlet cloak to shield herself from the elements before heading out to work.

"They called you in early," Morag had noted.

"Unspeakable business," Isobel had informed her breathlessly. "Highly classified—you know this. Left a note for Mum and Dad on the table. I'll be back soon."

Morag then protested when her sister rumpled her dark curls, and Isobel hurried out the door. That's when the sinking feeling of dread hit Morag and she first saw her ghost. Items were knocked down from shelves that Morag couldn't reach. Morag had forgotten to sweep the afternoon before as a part of her chores, and in the dust she saw the words scrawled in front of her: don't go.

Morag had flung open the door, running as fast as she could down the long front lawn of the MacDougal estate—but it was too late. Isobel had already Apparated to work.

She never came back.

Morag recited the date with ease for the book of records: "The tenth of August, 1994."

It had been so easy for the news of a missing team of Unspeakables to be ignored that summer. The Quidditch World Cup was that year, and shortly after the Unspeakables disappeared, the Death Eaters were on the rise. Any other year, four Ministry employees disappearing would have been the main news story. But it wasn't any other year.

It was only in the summer after the end of the war that Morag was finally able to get out of her parents' sight long enough to do something like this. She hadn't just sat around and waited, however. She'd tracked down the papers the week of the accident, as she had remembered that something significant had happened—but it had all been eclipsed by what was to follow.

The Daily Prophet the night before Isobel went missing spoke of a raid on the Corey Manor. The only remaining occupant of the house, one Aleister Corey, had been reported missing by the closest neighbors for a week before the Department of Magical Law Enforcement came to check it out. According to the article, no trace of Corey was found in the estate, but several inventions of his were. Corey was known for being a prolific technomancer who had lived alone for the last eighteen years after the death of his wife.

The Quibbler's article from the same week was what caused Morag to put two and two together. Before the war, she never would have considered Xenophilius Lovegood's paper to be anything close to credible. But he had proved to be the most credible of them all, and as such, Morag trusted his interpretation of events: Corey had created something allowing time-travel that had been entrusted to the team that disappeared. If that was true, then Isobel was only trapped in time and could be saved.

Morag had to believe that she could be saved.

* * *

Sure enough, the book opened to a file of that week and revealed the only recorded notes on the incident: _Queensbury, Rowle, MacDougal, and Fawley used the Time-Turner recovered from the Corey house. Something has gone wrong. No one has come back but the Time-Turner has returned_. There was also a stamp over the page marking it as a closed mission, too dangerous to continue working on. Morag scanned the page further and found the prototype Time-Turner was recorded as kept in the desk of the director.

She closed the little red book and returned it to its former place on the bookshelf. Then she turned around to the desk. She did not bother with the obvious drawers on the side. No,, as secure as this office likely was in the daytime, there was no way an artifact that dangerous would be just sitting in an office drawer where anybody could see it or pick the lock on it. No, there had to be a hidden drawer. Morag dropped down to the little alcove where a person's knees were supposed to go.

She gripped her wand between her teeth as she found the puzzle-lock on the underside of the table. For a few moments, she worked on it and freed the drawer. The Time-Turner practically bounced into her face. Morag winced, grabbing it as she pulled it by the chain up and off of the floor.

She placed it around her neck and sat up under the desk. Engraved on the surface was the following phrase in chicken scratch: _Turn three times and you'll be home._

Morag frowned as second thoughts raced through her head. This was one last chance to turn back, to put the Time-Turner where it belonged and escape before whatever happened to her sister claimed her as well and their parents were left without any daughters.

Then she remembered the lack of answers, how her parents had made a grave for Isobel but they had no one to bury. The Ministry had refused to make things right, so Morag would. She had a moral duty to. She did not hesitate again, and instead turned the Time-Turner three times.

Then she was sitting in the middle of a meadow. The air was cool, the sky a light dove-gray, with the sun shining between clouds. There was no danger of rain—just a calm, cool day. A million wildflowers in a pastel rainbow surrounded her and in the distance she could see a manor that resembled those in her Jane Austen books.

Morag scrambled to her feet, curious as to where exactly she had ended up. Letting go of the Time-Turner, she ran to the edge of the meadow, and saw a boy around her age in Edwardian clothing. He held a book in one hand and in the other a wand, from which sparks lazily drifted over the grass before fizzling out and perishing.

"Oi! Excuse me!" Morag called as she started towards the boy. "Have you seen anyone else around here, maybe someone who looks like me—"

The boy sat up, his lanky frame awkward now that he was scrambling to get to his feet. He frowned, gray eyes piercing. "Your clothes look funny—who're you?"

"Morag." She figured it couldn't hurt. "I'm looking for my sister. I-I thought she'd be here."

She looked around wildly as the boy approached her. He looked more curious than anything else. But her heart was racing. She'd thought that perhaps the inscription would help her, but she was starting to also realize that she had well and truly screwed up. She'd studied Croaker's Law. She knew that traveling past five hours prior was dangerous. Why had she thought this a good idea?

And where could Isobel be? There were endless times and places she could be, and who knew how any of this worked—

"It's alright," the boy said. "We'll find her—you have my word on the House of Corey."

He offered her his hand. Morag felt as if the pit of her stomach had been Transfigured into an iceberg. "What is your name?"

"Aleister Corey, of the Most Ancient and Noble House of the same name." He had a charming smile. "If your sister is wearing clothes as strange as yours, then we should find her in no time, Morag."

Morag blinked, stepping back. She had placed herself so vividly in the past with no precautions—the damage was done and who knew what the consequences would be? She remembered the story of Eloise Mimbleton, how so many people had been unborn, how the very nature of time had been irreparably thrown off—and Morag had done just the same.

And now this boy from the past was approaching with an open hand—and she knew she had to stop this right now.

"It's alright," he assured her. "There's no need to be afraid."

Morag reached for the Time-Turner again and frantically spun it. She didn't know how many times she'd turned it before she was gone, vanished from the meadow behind Corey Manor.

And so she was thrown into a world of blinding light, all sensations at once—and then she was floating in a world made of windows, all looking out at moments in her life, in all of time, at all angles. It was overwhelming, maddening—especially when Morag realized that it meant that she had failed, somehow.

There was no way out of here, not physically. Had this been Isobel's fate? Forced to watch her loved ones suffer her disappearance?

"I'm sorry, Mum! Dad!" Tears came to Morag's face. Her heartbeat drowned out all other sounds, distant as they were. This was all her fault, she should have stayed, should have grieved, should have moved on.

"What have I done?" Morag was overwhelmed by the sight of what she had left behind, by what she had done.

"I know how you feel."

Morag felt a hand take hers, although she didn't know where, and suddenly she was sitting on a cliffside, somewhere she didn't recognize. Next to her was an old man with a charming smile and gray eyes.

"That's better, isn't it? It took me a very long time to learn how the in-between worked, how to influence things and how to tune it all out." He chuckled. "Eventually, I was able to even move physical objects, give guidance and all that."

"You're Aleister Corey, aren't you?" Morag knew she had recognized the voice. With the gleam in his eye coinciding with his words, she realized that he was also her ghost.

"That would be correct." He bowed his head.

"You disappeared—you made this." She held up her Time-Turner. "Why? What's the point of all of this?"

There was something affectionate in his gaze. "To complete the circle and let it start again. You needed to be in 1904, in Wales on the family estate. And you needed to meet me, but younger-"

"But why?" Morag interrupted, frustrated. "This is dangerous magic! My sister was lost, and her entire team—"

"For love," Aleister said softly. He reached into a pocket of his robes, right over his heart. "This will explain everything."

Morag reluctantly accepted the little square locket from him and opened it. There was one wizarding picture inside of it, of a bride and groom on their wedding day. One was obviously a young Aleister Corey—and the other had her dark hair, although she had lost her thick pie-wedge bangs, but the hazel eyes and clever expression meant it had to be. . .

"It was me." It started to click into place. "Then you are. . ."

"About to die, soon," Aleister confirmed. "But I needed to start the circle again. We'll meet again soon."

"But what about my sister?" Morag demanded. "You still haven't answered for that!"

There was something mischievous there. "Turn back three times, and you'll understand."

Morag looked down at her Time-Turner. When she looked back for confirmation, Corey was gone.

She supposed there was only one thing left to do.

When she turned back three times, she was standing in the meadow again, with the Time-Travelers all around her.

"Morag?" Isobel squinted. "What's going—"

"No time." Morag stretched the chain, extending it around all of the others, the lost. "We've got to go home."

Three turns forward, she supposed, would do the trick.

In the blink of an eye, they were no longer in the meadow. Instead, it was midnight in the Department of Mysteries. Rowle, Queensbury, Fawley,Isobel and now Morag. All back, years later. There would be so much to do, so much to explain.

* * *

They had time to do so, in the weeks that followed the incident. Morag was questioned and sworn to secrecy as to her adventure in the Department of Mysteries just as any other Unspeakable would be. Not that she would tell anyone. At first, she had no intention of following any part of the life the old man had shown her. It was too dangerous, too reckless. And she had only met him once.

But when she tried to fall asleep at night, she'd keep wondering about what life she might have, or have had, or however the verb conjugated when it came to time-travel.

So, one morning, when it was calm and gray and perfect, Morag snuck out of the house in the early hours when no one was awake. She turned the Time-Turner three times and returned to a different perfect gray morning.


End file.
